Many professors gloss over these and other difficult moments, anxious that they won’t know how to handle the resulting discussion. Meanwhile, most students prefer that their instructors address difficult topics. This blog post describes three different approaches to talking with our students about upsetting issues.

Talk about it. Ask students how they feel about the issue, breaking students into smaller groups if necessary to let more students speak. Remind students of class discussion guidelines and expectations for respectful classroom interactions. To end, ask students to reflect on what they learned from someone else during the discussion, and use their points to synthesize main ideas. While students’ personal viewpoints can be a useful way of making abstract issues seem real, sometimes that level of personalization can cause too much tension in class; in those cases, consider providing students with a slight buffer by letting them talk about and analyze the range of opinions they hear people say.

Use disciplinary frameworks. Some fields have mental moves for addressing such issues. For example, a sociologist can use social stratification to analyze racist violence; an English class can explore the rhetoric of hate groups; a history class can analyze the history of gun violence; a gender studies class can present statistics on sexual assault and discuss sexual assault as a crime. We can show students how to apply a disciplinary analysis of the issue at hand.

Address the issue though course content. Even in a course in which “diversity” is not the topic, we can use materials to expose students to evidence. For example, in teaching statistics, we can introduce reasons racial violence affects the lived experience of Blacks by applying a new statistical procedure to data about deaths of Blacks at the hands of police in the US. Michele DiPietro of Kennesaw State University uses the debate about civil rights for LGBTQ people to frame his statistics course.

While it may feel like addressing difficult moments deviates from previously announced course topics, a great deal of learning can result. We don’t do this enough, and students appreciate it when we do.